Help needed with acer aspire bootup freeze

SaJellish · 08-26-2012, 04:08 PM

My acer aspire's USB ports fried in the middle of a system recovery. So I pulled my internal HDD and placed it in an external HDD casing and installed ubuntu on it as a bootable external HDD using a dell inspiron 15 inch. Now I want to use this external HDD as the internal HDD on my acer but this HDD works fine on the DELL(as external HDD) but freezes at bootup on acer aspire (as internal HDD). Since the USB ports are fried and it has no optical drive I have no way to boot the acer except this HDD. I think its a problem with screen resolution but I shall be grateful for any possible answers.

I just need the system to bootup as I have already done a fresh install on the external HDD........

cr0d0m · 08-26-2012, 10:16 PM

When you installed ubuntu on your external disk did you install boot sector also on that disk??

SaJellish · 08-26-2012, 10:29 PM

Yes I have installed the bootloader...........
In my acer laptop it displays the grub screen properly but when I enter the ubuntu for bootup it freezes at the violet screen.
In the ubuntu recovery it gives different errors like no filesystem etc and launced into grub rescue mode

I think its a resolution issue since the resolution of dell is 1366*768 and acer is 1024*800 though I am not sure

Wim Sturkenboom · 08-26-2012, 11:48 PM

So if I understand you correctly, you do get the grub menu?

If so, select the entry that you want to boot (in your case probably the first one), press 'e' and edit the kernel line (the one that usually ends with 'quiet splash'). Add the keyword text at the end (so the line reads 'quiet splash text') and your system will boot to console.

You can also remove 'quiet splash' to get more verbose output that might give you an indication what actually goes wrong.

EDDY1 · 08-26-2012, 11:54 PM

Since you have no cd or usb ports on acer you may have to install sometking like debian which has the option for loading a kernel with all modules, which will boot another machine.
The only problem I can see is if you do it from usb you may have to remap the drive.
Easier if yu put inside Dell to install OS thenmove to acer.

SaJellish · 08-26-2012, 11:56 PM

the said changes gave the following output

booting a command list
couldn't read file . . . .

cr0d0m · 08-27-2012, 12:58 PM

You can change resolution in grub by pressing "e" and add "vga=971" or resolution vhat you need if you think that is resolution problem.

SaJellish · 08-27-2012, 05:14 PM

In the recovery mode the screen freezes at

Booting a command list
Loading Linux 3.2.0-23-generic-pae ...

The cursor blinks after that but the screen just hangs

Wim Sturkenboom · 08-30-2012, 02:03 AM

Using your Dell, can you post the content of /boot/grub/grub.cfg , more specifically the sections for the 'normal' boot and the 'recovery' boot

I suspect that they point to 'sdb' (hd(1,1)) instead of 'sda' (hd(0,1))

Code:

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ###
menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.32-33-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
	recordfail
	insmod ext2
	set root='(hd0,1)'
	search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 0470c9ff-c0e7-4529-b896-392ea32c2331
	linux	/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-33-generic root=UUID=0470c9ff-c0e7-4529-b896-392ea32c2331 ro   quiet splash
	initrd	/boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-33-generic
}
menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.32-33-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
	recordfail
	insmod ext2
	set root='(hd0,1)'
	search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 0470c9ff-c0e7-4529-b896-392ea32c2331
	echo	'Loading Linux 2.6.32-33-generic ...'
	linux	/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-33-generic root=UUID=0470c9ff-c0e7-4529-b896-392ea32c2331 ro single 
	echo	'Loading initial ramdisk ...'
	initrd	/boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-33-generic
}